If past is a guide, Cuomo donor list will be long on interested parties

ALBANY — On Friday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is scheduled to disclose his fundraising during the past six months. If last year's haul is any indication, most of the money will come from donors who have business before his office or an interest in legislation.

POLITICO New York examined each of the 454 checks Cuomo collected in last year’s July filing period. More than 90 percent of his money, or $4.5 million of the $5 million he raised, came from advocates for legislation or donors with business directly before the state.

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This includes $268,250 from registered lobbyists and the firms for which they work. Clients for these lobbyists accounted for an additional $2 million, and companies that were identified as recipients of executive branch contracts by the comptroller’s Open Book New York site gave $393,500. The rest of the money primarily came from appointees to various state posts, companies that received contracts from authorities or individuals who were the principal funders of lobbying campaigns.

Cuomo has repeatedly criticized the campaign finance system under which he operates. “Unless you make a significant contribution, your voice is no more than a whisper in the political process,” he said last month while pushing for a reform package that won’t have any impact on any practices in which his campaign engages. But the governor’s office says donations have no effect on any of his actions.

“No contribution of any size influences any government action — period,” said spokesman Rich Azzopardi. “As the Governor previously said, any elected official who is influenced by one shouldn’t be in office in the first place.”

Advocates hoping to influence the outcome of some of the issues that dominated the 2015 legislative session gave generously to the governor. Rent regulation and 421-a tax credits for developers were up for renewal; real estate developers and construction companies and their executives accounted for more than a third of the governor’s haul.

Cuomo spent much of the 2015 session pushing for the education reforms advocated by private schools and charter school networks, and the hedge fund managers who funded some of these advocates gave him $286,700 and hosted a Hamptons fundraiser on his behalf.

The state was going to award medical marijuana licenses in July, and companies seeking these contracts gave $67,500 in the preceding months.

In some instances, the flow of money to Cuomo increased as he amplified his public efforts on particular issues. Outside of some donations from groups representing public safety workers and first responders, Cuomo had received only $25,000 from labor unions through May of last year. In the remaining six weeks of the filing period, unions advocating for a prevailing wage in the 421-a deal being negotiated at the session’s end gave $125,800. Additionally, the Hotel & Motel Trades Council gave $25,000 after the governor held a June 11 minimum wage rally at its headquarters, and other unions that backed the rally gave $75,000.

There’s a long list of instances in which companies made donations at roughly the same time that projects partially funded by the state and in which they had an interest moved forward.

The Cleveland-based NRP group was one of two companies involved in an affordable housing development in Corning. On May 12, the governor announced a $4.7 million state grant for the development. On May 13, the developer gave $25,000 to the governor. (In Cuomo’s first term, that company loaned the governor a private jet for campaign purposes and it received $3.3 million to construct housing in Ballston).

Pasadena’s Parsons Corporation gave Cuomo $5,000 on May 29. Three weeks later, it announced that it had been selected by the Department of Environmental Conservation to deal with “emergencies caused by crude oil trains.”

New York State Homes and Community Renewal joined MacQuestern Development to break ground on a Mount Vernon project on March 27; the company and its executives gave Cuomo $30,000 over the succeeding five days and an additional $30,000 in July.

Limited liability companies, corporations and individuals linked to Tully Construction gave the governor $136,500 during his first term, and the $75,100 it donated in the first 200 days of his second (which began on Jan. 1, 2015) was enough to make it his third largest donor during the period under examination. The comptroller’s website identifies Tully as the vendor involved in seven contracts with the Department of Transportation valued at $468 million, six of which were signed in 2014 or 2015.

There were numerous other examples of Cuomo donors who received lucrative contracts during this time.

In April of 2015, Cuomo announced that taxpayer funding would assist in a $24.4 million Niagara Falls project; the companies involved and their executives gave him $35,000 during the disclosure period. Cuomo received $15,000 from Whitestone Capital Partners, LLC on April 20; a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates its sole member is Joseph Simone, whose Simone Development had signed a $16 million deal with Empire State Development for a mixed-use complex in the Bronx two months prior.

Florida-based renewable energy company NextEra gave Cuomo a $5,000 contribution on June 9, the day before it announced it had completed work at Tompkins Cortland Community College that had been funded by a renewable energy program that Cuomo implemented. Devon Management gave Cuomo $5,000 as it was constructing an independent living facility in Newburgh that received funding from two state agencies.

In May, Cuomo reported receiving $5,000 from a company called BCGHQ Inc. with an address matching the Blasdell headquarters of Buffalo Computer Graphics; in September, the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services announced it would provide every county with access to software developed by the company.

An executive at Triangle Equities, to whom the Cuomo administration proposed giving $16.5 million in subsidies for work in Staten Island, gave $25,000. And as the Times Union previously reported, Steven Aaron — whose LLCs gave the governor $25,000 during this six-month stretch and much more in prior years — received millions from the Division of Housing and Community Renewal for work in Schoharie after Cuomo-appointed commissioner Darryl Towns “bypassed competing projects that had higher recommendations from his staff.”

Many Cuomo donors had an interest in legislation outside of the major advocacy efforts mentioned above. For example, LLCs connected to Kiryas Joel developer Mayer Hirsch gave the governor $250,000 less than a week after he vetoed a bill designed to restrict development in Kiryas Joel.

During Cuomo’s first term, his sixth-biggest donor was Adam Katz, whose LLCs gave $232,342, including an in-kind contribution of a private jet trip the governor used to travel to Bolton Landing. In 2013, Katz’s competitors filed a complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration alleging that Katz’s jet charter business had been given preferential treatment by state officials at the Department of Transportation after they bypassed a public bidding process when awarding his Talon Air the exclusive rights to sell fuel at Republic Airport.

In the six months under examination, Cuomo received an additional $20,000 from members of Katz’s family. He also picked up a $25,000 donation from “Elana Charters, LLC.” There’s not much out there that would let one reach definitive conclusions about the identity of this entity — the address disclosed by Cuomo is that of Delaware-based The Company Corporation. But according to a 2010 British book about boats, Elana Charters is the name of a Katz business which oversaw the redesign of a yacht.

This donation was made fewer than three months after a tax break for yachts was included in the budget that passed in 2015. That same budget also ended sales tax for the purchase of private jets that cost more than $230,000 and sit fewer than 20 people, a description that seems to fit for the entirety of Katz’s fleet, and the following year’s added a new tax exemption for distributors of gasoline used for “commercial aircraft and general aviation aircraft.”

Money also came from donors who were the direct subjects of regulatory actions by state agencies. For example, executives at Tunnel Hill Partners gave Cuomo $25,000 on July 12 and 13. At that time, Department of Environmental Conservation officials were weighing whether to let the company transport waste through parts of Glendale and Ridgewood in Queens.

In recent months, federal investigators have sent a number of subpoenas seeking information about the Cuomo administration’s dealings with companies involved in state-backed economic development projects such as the Buffalo Billion. Three of these companies — Columbia Development, Conifer Realty, and CHA Consulting — combined to give the governor $75,000 over these six months.

There have been no allegations that these firms engaged in any illegal activity. And since New York doesn’t have any pay-to-play prohibitions, each of the donations was perfectly permissible.